Barack Obama’s promise to fix U.S. health care was no doubt one of the reasons he was elected President by such a comfortable margin. It is unlikely, however, that many of the voters realized he intended to give government bureaucrats the power to make law. Nonetheless, the President and his congressional accomplices have inserted language into their health “reform” legislation that does just that.
Among the bureaucracies thus empowered will be the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). This is the same agency that recently issued the controversial finding that women between 40 and 50 shouldn’t bother to have annual mammograms. The Democrats have said that the USPSTF only makes “recommendations,” but that’s not what their legislation says. As the Heritage foundation puts it:
Section 2713 of the Senate Health Bill would give the recommendations of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force the force of law by requiring all health insurance plans to provide coverage for ‘items or services that have in effect a rating of A or B in the current recommendations of the United States Preventive Services Task Force.’
Much has been written about the questionable constitutionality of a federal mandate requiring individuals to buy health insurance, but this plan to give bureaucrats law-making power has gone largely unnoticed. It is unlikely that many average Americans had ever heard of the USPSTF before the recent mammogram controversy. Yet, if the Democrats have their way, the whims of such agencies will become the law of the land.
And the USPSTF is by no means the only obscure entity that we’ll have to worry about. As originally conceived, Obama’s independent Medicare Commission would have had the power to create law without the inconvenience of constitutional checks and balances. It appears that a backroom deal in the Senate has killed (or at least maimed) that monster, but bad ideas have a Hydra-like quality inside the Beltway.
Who knows how many of the 111 new bureaucracies created by Obamacare will be invested with such power? I don’t think this is what the voters (even the rank-and-file Democrats) signed on for last year.
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